Description

Chronic pain is common in children and significantly interferes with their daily functioning. Pain neuroscience education (PNE) has proven to be an effective way of improving chronic pain in adults and preliminary proof-of-concept-findings in pediatric chronic pain are highly promising. Furthermore, previous research has shown that children are eager, receptive and even‘pre- programmed’ to engage with robots. Accordingly, using a robot for providing PNE may facilitate effective transmission of information and hence, increase child’s usage of coping strategies they are taught.The main objective is to examine whether robot-assisted parent engaged PNE (RA-PNE4Kids) is effective in improving pain-related functional disability and pain intensity in children with chronic pain compared to PNE provided by a therapist only and engaged by a parent (PNE4Kids). A multicenter randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 6-month follow-up among children with chronic pain will be performed. Eighty children between 6 and 12 years old who are suffering from chronic pain will be randomized to the experimental (RA-PNE4Kids) or control intervention (PNE4Kids). The primary outcome measure includes child’s functional disability; secondary outcomes include child’s pain intensity, parent’s catastrophic thinking about their child’s pain and child’s and parent’s pain- related fear.